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Concern trolls and health care

I see them more frequently now than I ever have. “Concern troll” is a term with which I’ve become familiar only recently. Urban dictionary has a pretty good explanation:

“In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with “concerns”. The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you’re an ally.”

So in practice, how does this work? Let’s take an example like Democratic Senator Max Baucus. Baucus does not want a public option in any health care plan. He simply is not on that side. Why doesn’t he want it? It doesn’t really matter for the sake of this argument (but it might have something to do with the $$$ he has gotten from the health care industry.) As a concern troll, he is opposed to the public option from the start. Which is precisely why he voted against it today.

But of course he doesn’t admit his opposition. He still claims to support a public option. To explain his vote, he says that he simply wants so very much to get a health care bill passed, and he just knows that it won’t pass if there were a public option included. That the bill won’t gain GOP support – or even pass – with or without a public option is besides the point. The point is that Baucus wants to be taken seriously as a champion of health care reform, so instead of admitting his personal opposition to the public option, he claims to support it, but with concerns that prevent him from, you know, actually supporting it.

And examples of concern trolls are everywhere. Democratic Senator Ben Nelson threw his chips into the pot, saying that a health care bill wouldn’t be “legitimate” unless it had 65 votes. He supports health care! Promise! He just has concerns that the bill won’t be legitimate, and might not be able to vote for health care unless some bullshit arbitrary number of GOP senators jump aboard.

The whole point of concern trolling is to have your opinions taken more seriously by pretending to be on one side when you are in fact not. But I don’t mean to sound like a shrill, unhinged leftist. Max Baucus and Ben Nelson are reasonable, centrist moderates, who are just looking out for the best interests of health care reform. Right?

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A side note: the Dem senators most likely to go against health care reform are from small states that Obama lost — LA, NE, MT, ND.

I wonder, as a result, where the Republicans who won Obama states are. Where’s the pressure? Sure, we talk about the constituency of one, Olympia Snowe, but what about Collins, Voinovich, Grassley, and Gregg?

Do Republicans simply have more control over their members? Or must we be cynics and assume that the rich and powerful always protect the rich and powerful?